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Melissa was drinking a beer and had a cigarette on the go. The place was almost empty. There was an old man reading a newspaper at a table near the door and there were two young guys on stools at the bar. I caught the eye of the barman and pointed at Melissa’s beer. He nodded back at me. The normality of this little routine belied how strange and unsettled I was feeling. A few weeks earlier I’d been sitting opposite Vernon in a booth of a cocktail lounge on Sixth Avenue. Now, thanks to some unaccountable dream-logic, I was sitting in a booth opposite Melissa in this place.

‘You look good,’ she said. Then, holding up an admonitory finger, she added, ‘And don’t tell me I look good, because I know I don’t.’

It occurred to me that despite the changes – the weight, the lines, the weariness – nothing could eradicate the fact that Melissa was still beautiful. But after what she’d said I couldn’t think of any way to tell her this without sounding patronizing. What I said was, ‘I’ve lost quite a bit of weight recently.’

Looking me straight in the eyes, she replied, ‘Well, MDT will certainly do that to you.’

‘Yeah, I suppose it will.’

In as quiet and circumspect a voice as I could muster, I then asked, ‘So, what do you know about all of this?’

‘Well,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘here’s the bottom line, Eddie. MDT is lethal, or can be, and if it doesn’t kill you, it’ll do serious damage to your brain, and I’m talking about permanently.’ She then pointed to her own head with the index finger of her right hand, and said, ‘It fucked my brain up – which I’ll go into later – but the point I want to make now is, I was one of the lucky ones.’

I swallowed.

The barman appeared with a tray. He placed a glass of beer down in front of me and exchanged the ashtray on the table with a clean one. When he’d gone, Melissa continued. ‘I only took nine or ten hits, but there was one guy who took a lot more than that, over a period of weeks, and I know he died. Another unfortunate shmoe ended up as a vegetable. His mother had to sponge him down every day and feed him with a spoon.’

My stomach was jumping now, and a mild headache had started up.

‘When was this?’

‘About four years ago.’ She paused. ‘Vernon didn’t tell you any of this stuff?’ I shook my head. She seemed surprised. Then, as though great physical effort were required for what she was doing, she took a deep breath. ‘OK,’ she went on, ‘so about four years ago Vernon was hanging out with a client of his who worked at some pharmaceutical plant and had access that he shouldn’t have had to a whole range of new drugs. One of them in particular, which didn’t have a name yet and hadn’t been tested, was supposed to be … amazing. So, in order to test it, because of course they were too goddamned shrewd to test it themselves, Vernon and this guy started getting people – their friends basically – to take it.’

‘Even you?’

‘Vernon didn’t want me to take it at first, but he talked it up so much that I insisted. You know what I was like, curious to a fault.’

‘It wasn’t a fault.’

‘Anyway, a few of us found ourselves in on this – I don’t know – let’s call it an informal trial period.’ She paused and took a sip from her beer. ‘So what do you want, I took it and it was amazing.’ She paused again, and looked at me for confirmation. ‘I mean, you’ve taken it, you know what I’m talking about, right?’

I nodded.

‘Well. I did it a few more times and then I got scared.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because … I wasn’t stupid. I knew no one could maintain that level of mental activity for very long and survive. It was nonsense. Let me give you an example, one day I read Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe … superstring theory, yeah? I read it in forty-five minutes, and understood it.’ She took a last drag from her cigarette. ‘Don’t ask me about it now, though.’ She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘Then I had this thing I was supposed to be working on at the time, a series of articles about self-organizing adaptive systems – the research that’s been done into them, their wider applicability, whatever. My work-rate increased ten-fold overnight, I’m not kidding you. My boss at Iroquois magazine thought I was pitching for his job as Features Editor. So I guess I just chickened out. I panicked. I couldn’t handle it. I stopped taking it.’

She shrugged her shoulders a couple of times.

‘And?’

‘And – eh – I started getting sick, after a few weeks, headaches, nausea. Talk about panic. I went back to Vernon to see if I maybe shouldn’t take another hit, or half a hit, see if that would make any difference. But that was when he told me about this other guy who’d just died.’

‘How had he died?’

‘Rapid two-day deterioration – headaches, dizziness, loss of motor skills, blackouts. Boom. He was dead.’

‘How much had he taken?’

‘One hit every day for about a month.’

I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.

‘How much have you been taking, Eddie?’